Simon Panek: a former student leader remembers the drama of November 1989

My guest in One on One is Simon Panek. Today he is well known as the
director and one of the co-founders of People in Need, one of the Czech
Republic's biggest non-governmental organizations. People in Need works
around the world to ease the suffering of people in times of crisis - be
it war, famine or flood, and has become hugely respected far beyond this
country's borders. But Simon Panek first came to the public's attention
for a very different reason. It was seventeen years ago this month that he
was at the heart of the events that came to be known as the Velvet
Revolution. As a twenty-two-year-old student, he was one of the organizers
of the demonstration on the 17th November that was the catalyst for the
rapid collapse of the communist regime. For several months students had
been trying to play a more active role in bringing about change.

"The first discussions that were more concrete began around the
beginning of 1989 among a few groups of students in Prague, and then
through the summer and the beginning of the autumn it was materialized in
the building of 'Stuha' which means ribbon [also an abbreviation of
Studentske hnuti, meaning 'student movement']. Stuha consisted of around
45 people from different faculties, who knew each other and trusted each
other and planned to organize various student anti-regime actions."

What were your aims - because I think that nobody at that time had any
idea that within a year all the communist regimes of Central Europe would
collapse like a house of cards?

"The aims were probably a lot more practical - just the ability to
spread information among ourselves, because a lot of unofficial
demonstrations had been happening since 1988. And then there was a kind of
strong feeling that we as students should start to do something as well. We
were not very concrete about what it will be. We had no strategic plan. We
had just a few ideas and one of them was to organize a demonstration on
17th November. It turned into the biggest demonstration since 1968 or
1969, and finally the demonstration which started the very quick collapse
of the Czechoslovakian communists."

Tell me a little bit about the events of that day, because it really has
gone down as a milestone in Czech and Slovak history.

"I was not in Prague. That is my very simple answer! I didn't attend
the demonstration because I was out of Prague for a few days making some
small money as a university student, so I can't comment on it."

November 1989You must have found out pretty soon what happened - that the students in
Narodni Street had been stopped violently by the police and that people
had been injured. Did you find out straight away from your friends?

"Not from my friends, because there were no mobile phones, the
communications were very limited, the regime controlled basically every
means of communication. We found it out through radio - the BBC and Voice
of America. I returned back during the weekend because the 17th was a
Friday evening, and then, I don't know how, but I somehow found my
colleagues from the student network and some other active students, and we
started to produce the first statements with the demands of the
students."

What happened next? There was a series of further demonstrations, there
was a student strike, then a general strike....

"Yes, the students decided, with the cooperation of the actors and
theatres, to start the strike from Monday 20th November. The first
statements and demands of the students were completed during the night
between Sunday and Monday. Then I returned home with the feeling that I
had to be aware of the fact that I wouldn't be able to do so again for the
next few weeks, because things were getting really serious. Then on Monday
my faculty joined the strike with a vote - there was a session of the
students and the professors, and all of them, or at least the vast
majority, decided that we would join the occupation strike. We got the
keys from the dean, the dean left the faculty and the students started to
reign the Natural Science Faculty. In the first days we were very much
aware that a kind of information war is at stake because the communists
tried still to control the television and radio and through their very
strong propaganda they tried to control the possible support for the
students. But the emotive message that the police had brutally attacked a
student demonstration was so strong that it sensitized and mobilized a lot
of - let's say - ordinary people, who then joined the massive
demonstrations, and the demonstrations turned very soon into the strongly
anti-communist, anti-regime demonstration, with one main demand - the end
of the leading role of the Communist Party."

And were you afraid at that time - or was there so much euphoria and
optimism that you were just riding on a wave?

"The first two days were very tense because the militia - the
Communist Party armoured units - started to come in large numbers into
Prague and there were rumours that the army maybe will step in, and some
of the communist leaders indeed proposed at closed sessions that very
strong and heavy power should be used, but I think that after the third or
fourth day of the strikes it was clear that they basically can't stop it,
that they might send something and they might capture a few dozen people
or a few hundred people, but that if they do so another few thousand
people will go out into the streets, and they will lose anyway. So it was
quite clear in very few days that there was no real danger for us."

By the end of the year the regime had collapsed and Vaclav Havel was
president. Unlike some people in similar positions to yourself, you didn't
follow a political career.

"No, I did not follow a political career. There were a few reasons
for that. I had a feeling that I was too young. I was 22 years old and had
no feeling that it was the right time to start to be a professional
politician. That's one thing. Another thing, which is more egoistic, was
that I had just got freedom and wanted to travel around the world. I
wanted to start some journalistic work, things that were forbidden for me
before. So I didn't want to lose my freedom by joining politics at that
time. Two years later I basically returned back to public life, being one
of the founding members of People in Need, probably the strongest NGO in
the Czech Republic."

The work of People in Need is extremely well known both in the Czech
Republic and internationally. You have done a great deal to help people in
many different situations and many parts of the world. To what extent was
your commitment to this work formed at the time of the Velvet Revolution?

"If you have a look at our human rights and democratization
department in People in Need, it does the same things in Cuba, Belarus and
other places as were done by western countries during communism to the
Czech Republic. So we basically carry on the moral duty to continue with
very similar work, supporting the opposition, supporting the families of
political prisoners, supporting independent journalists in non-democratic
countries, because we still remember how important it was for our country
that people from abroad helped us."